PACE President welcomes Strasbourg Court’s el-Masri judgment

13/12/2012

President

Strasbourg, 13.12.2012 – Jean-Claude Mignon, President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), has welcomed today’s judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of el-Masri v. “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”.

“This judgment can be called historic: it is the first condemnation, by an international court, of the CIA practice of renditions and secret detentions, which the Court has likened to enforced disappearance and cruel and inhuman treatment,” said Mr Mignon.

“The Court made it very clear that such practices are serious violations of the European Convention on Human Rights. On behalf of the Assembly, I can only welcome this judgment, which also vindicates the findings of the Assembly’s reports on this subject-matter prepared by our esteemed former colleague Dick Marty from Switzerland.”

In 2006 and 2007, the Assembly adopted two high-profile investigative reports on illegal transfers of detainees and secret detentions in Council of Europe member states, which highlighted the case of Khaled el-Masri as a particularly well-documented example of illicit practices by the CIA. These reports gave rise to parliamentary and judicial investigations in several member states of the Council of Europe.